The one with the giant rubberband...

When biker's ride together, a cardinal rule to live by is to ride in lines and staggered. This gives everyone enough space in the event of a problem, but still allows everyone to stay together. Plus, it makes us far more visible.



We use hand signals for all of our movements from right to left.



And when we're stopped, we all stop side by side.



When we change lanes, FIL D says it's like watching a giant rubberband. It really is, the back eventually catches up with the front's motion but it takes a minute.



FIL D rides sweep, the guy in the yellow there, Bubba, is our new head road captain but he wasn't leading this ride on account he didn't know where he was going. But everyone has there own place and we all fall into it really well.



When we park the bikes, we park them in lines.



When we leave, we all get ready in the same stages, kind of scary.



Of course, if you're slow, you might get left behind. We try not to leave anyone behind but if you're in a big group and you're last...well...



We like our lines.



And we like our hand signals.

FFR

The one with Uncle G

When everyone gets ready to go riding, we all put on our leathers. As such, it becomes difficult to tell one person from another (until you learn their leather style and their bikes). But Uncle G is really easy to tell:

Can you tell yet?

How about now? Very distinct.

I've seen white ones, but never the bright green one. At least, not in our group. For this reason, I always know when I'm photographing Uncle G.

FFR

The one with pretty pictures

When we're out riding or when I'm out driving or just walking or wherever I am, I tend to get some nature pictures. Problem is, I don't usually have a way to work these photos in to what I'm writing about, so they accumulate. Today, I'm going to do a pretty photo dump. Please enjoy:

These two photos were from our ride on Friday, on our way home I snapped these really quick then popped into my editor to make them better.



This one I snapped on Sunday on our way to the convention. I love that I managed to catch so many birds. I've been trying to do this for weeks and haven't been successful.



The focus on this is intentional. I really like the rain splattered windshield being in focus and still seeing everything behind it.



I just wanted to show you the fog. All of the fog. For a week we had endless fog. Now it's gone...somewhat. We'll see how long that lasts.

FFR

The one with all the pretty bikes

At the show on Sunday I took pictures of a bunch of my favorite bikes...and some of the weird bikes.

I loved the colors on this bike. Especially with the aged coloring.

This painting is stunning.

Love, love, love this rose. I don't much like roses but this is beautiful.

Okay, here's a weird bike. Little headlight...behind a large magnifying glass. I wanted to see this one lit up.

The joker. This bike was incredibly painted. There are question marks even on his skin!

This frog is so cute!

Here's another weird bike. There are eyeballs in the seat.

And this one is MADE of eyeballs.

I love the color of this one more than the content.

Mini bikes!

There were a lot more bikes there and there were plenty I would post here but I don't want to overwhelm you. I think the eyeballs in the seat or the bike made of eyeballs did that all on their own.

FFR

The one with all the luck

About once or twice a year I get extra lucky. Yesterday was one of those days. A whole group of us went to this:

We got there very early because of this:

We anticipated a crowd and we got one. Our bikes were completely blocked in. A guy on the street from Sac Harley gave us free tickets to the show, lucky #1. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. To start, we went to breakfast at some little place down the street.

We were having fun...but it took over an hour to get our food. When I finally got mine, I got the wrong one. When they brought out another one 15 minutes later, it had cardboard in it. So I got it free. Lucky #2.

Lucky #3: When we got out of the show, we were still blocked in but there were some guys out there watching the bikes in front of ours and were able to pull out for us.

Pretty lucky day for me. I'll post some pictures of the bikes at the show tomorrow.

FFR